We are working with a server running ESXi 6.7 Enterprise Plus, and the mobo has 2 Xeon 10-core CPU's.
The host is moderately loaded, but strangely the ESXi monitoring screen shows MAX socket (package) 0 at 87% utilization, and socket (package) 1 at 2.5% utilization, and AVERAGE socket 0 at 20% and socket at 1%.
Is this normal? Should ESXi be balancing the load across the 2 CPU's? Or does it fill one and then start using the other.
License is installed and should support 2 sockets I think (though I don't see a CPU limit on the licensing tab of the GUI). I didn't purchase the hardware/license so I don't know too much about what was purchased but I can see the license tab and it looks right-ish. I just don't see anything that says 2 SOCKETS...so I'm wondering if another license needs to be purchased to activate the second socket? Does anyone with ESXi 6.7 with Enterprise Plus have a line in their license tab showing # of sockets licensed?
Answer
The ESXi scheduler is NUMA aware. By default, it will prefer to keep VMs on one socket's cores and memory if possible. An overview of this is in the Resource Management Guide.
You can show 2 sockets get used by putting more load on the host. If its usual workload isn't enough, create a 14 core VM and run something multi-threaded and CPU intensive. Have fun with it, maybe compile a very large software package, or donate some CPU cycles to science. Both sockets should be well over 2% utilized, because the VM is larger than one node.
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